Overview of Communities

Communities in API Portal define the exposure of APIs to consumers. A community can have one or more administrators that manage the members of a community.

API Administrators have the privileges to assign community administrators, add users to, and remove users from a community. API Consumers have access to APIs depending on whether they belong to a specific community or not.

There are two types of communities: Public Community and Private Community.

The public community is a community any registered user can join. Each API Portal instance features only one public community. By default, all APIs are assigned to the Public Community and they are visible to all users. This is the default community of a user joining without specifying a private community. Members of the public community can see the public APIs. Guests do not belong to the public community. APIs published to the API Portal without a community are visible to the public community. Public APIs are visible to all communities including the public community.

Note:

When you remove an API from a public community and if the API does not belong to any other community, then the API is deleted from API Portal.

A private community is a group of users in API Portal that users can join through an invitation. Community membership grants API consumers access to private APIs. When you assign an API to a community, it becomes visible to the community members. Communities can have one or more community administrators. APIs that are associated to a private community are only visible to users that belong to this community. Each private community has one or more community administrators. Community administrators can add users to or remove users from the community.

To add existing users, the administrator needs the full user ID.

New users are invited to join API Portal and the community of the inviter. New users invited to a private community are not added to the public community.

If users do not belong to any other community including public communities, they are removed from API Portal. Access tokens belonging to the community are revoked from the removed user.

Note:

If you want to add an API to a private community and restrict its visibility to the community members, you have to add the API to the private community and then remove it from the public community.

For details on creating communities, adding members to or removing members from a community, adding APIs to or removing APIs from a community and defining a community administrator, see webMethods API Portal Online Help